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Updated: May 23, 2025
But, after all, I like the English angler best when he travels at home, and writes of dry-fly fishing in the Itchen or the Test, or of wet-fly fishing in Northumberland or Sutherlandshire. There is a fascinating booklet that appeared quietly, some years ago, called AN AMATEUR ANGLER'S DAYS IN DOVE DALE. It runs as easily and merrily and kindly as a little river, full of peace and pure enjoyment.
For to think so is to despair of England, to realise that England of my heart has really passed away. There are two ways by which a man may go from Romsey, in the valley of the Test to Winchester, in the valley of the Itchen.
Not Avon for all its beauty, nor Itchen, nor Test. Wherein, then, does the "Wylye bourne" differ from these others, and what is its special attraction? It was only when I set myself to think about it, to analyse the feeling in my own mind, that I discovered the secret that is, in my own case, for of its effect on others I cannot say anything.
About the upper waters of Severn, where Sabrina is still unvexed by pollution, and where the stream is not greater than Tweed at Peebles, sport is fair in spring. Though the Devonshire, and Border, and probably the Welsh waters, are just in their prime, the season is not yet for the Itchen and the Kennet, with their vast over-educated and over-fed monsters of the deep.
The main road winds on to pleasant Alresford, where Mary Russell Mitford was born. The principal attraction of the town is a large lake, made by Bishop de Lucy in the twelfth century as an aid to the navigation of the Itchen.
This man, Henry Ransome by name, was, I have been informed, constantly intoxicated during the first three months of wedlock, and then the ill-assorted couple disappeared from the neighbourhood of Itchen, and took up their abode in one of the hamlets of the New Forest.
The New Forest is a wild, uninhabited stretch of heath and woodland, many of the trees gnarled and aged, and its very wildness, the lack of cultivation, the ruggedness, made it strongly attractive in my eyes, and suggested my own country. The birds of course were much less plentiful than beside the Itchen. The bird that most impressed me on my walk was the blackbird.
"So, gentlemen, you see that the people in those parts are very clever chaps, and if you take them at their own value, there are none to be found like them in all the world. I have another story for you to prove this. "One day a poor Jew fell into the Itchen.
Itchen Abbas, the goal of this short journey, is not five miles from the centre of Winchester and is a great resort of fishermen. Here Charles Kingsley came to stay at the "Plough" and, I am told, wrote a good part of Water Babies between spells upon the trout stream near-by. Possibly these charming chapters were planned while the author watched the placid waters before him.
The more beautiful, for it gives you, if you will, not only Otterbourne, Shawford and Compton to the west of the stream, but Twyford to the east, the Queen of Hampshire villages, is that which makes for the Roman road between Winchester and Southampton, and following up the valley of the Itchen enters Winchester at last, by the South Gate, after passing St Cross in the meads.
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